The White Lady of Perion
by Goates
Summary: The White Lady of Perion is supposedly a fiction character, a myth of some sorts to players of the game Maplestory. It's said that she has disappeared from the game entirely, yet I think I can tell you differently.


"Don't be ridiculous, it's just a myth!" words most people have thrown at me after I finish my tale. I don't blame them; it's silly if you haven't experienced it. It's not something that frightening if you think about it, a 'ghost' inside of a game.

The game was freshly released, well it had been out for a while but it was still very young of age, just like me. I think was about 11 years old? Hah, time has passed quite well ever since. Unlike what you might expect, it was a clear and bright Saturday morning. I had just finished eating my breakfast, after my dad had brought home the groceries. As usual, he went out to fill up his car and buy smokes.

Eager to play a game I had loved for a few weeks now, I booted up my good old PC. For the time we were in, it was an amazing piece of technology. Playing online games on it was a piece of cake, especially a simple side scroller like Maplestory.

Just moments after I had booted up the game, I fired up Maplestory. I didn't really have much to do on Saturdays, so I'd spend all day on the game without much realization. My mother would be working all day and my dad would be watching television downstairs, so they wouldn't tell me to take a break at all.

"MurielLovesu1231"  
>"LightNPC222"<br>"1231"

I logged on. When I first started playing, I wanted to play in Windia. I liked the emblem it had and the name just seemed really nice to me. However some of my online friends whom I had known from making websites, had stopped me and told me to play in Bera, with them. I figured that the name and emblem didn't matter that much and joined my friends in Bera.

I don't really know what came up to me when I logged on that morning, but instead of playing my Priest, I decided to make a new character. I went through the quests on Maple Island and arrived in Lith Harbor. For the fun of it, I made my way through the maps instead of taking a taxi. "Why waste money? Let's enjoy the scenery!" I had thought probably.

I wasn't much of a warrior person, but for some reason I thought it would be nice to make a Spearman. Us Priests and Dragon Knights used to have a great relationship. For that reason, I thought it would be nice to get to know a bit more about the class to understand what they do when we trained together.

I headed up to Perion to speak with Dances with the Balrog. For some apparent reason the music didn't play. I restarted the game, hoping it would fix the sound problem. I liked listening to the music in games, mostly because my sense of music at that time wasn't really all too developed, but also because Maplestory just has really nice music.

Restarting the game didn't seem to help much. I checked the sound on my computer, which seemed to be working perfectly fine. I probably turned off the sound for Maplestory yesterday; I had no clue how to put it back on however. I looked around my room. It was a huge mess with toys and stuffed animals. I decided not to ask my dad to fix it. Music in a game was not worth the rage and effort I had to put into cleaning.

I went inside the Dances with Balrog's house. Everything seemed just fine as I talked to Dances. I became a warrior and set out to train on stumps. I didn't like questing that much, so I thought I'd just grind all day to quickly gain levels.

It had been about an hour when I realized how incredibly ridiculous it was that I was training this character and that I could have used this hour to get a precious 10% on my Priest. I looked in my inventory and saw that I did collect a bit of money I could transfer to my Priest. I didn't have a return scroll, but I only had to walk back two maps, so it was fine.

I went through the portal on the left, to get back to Perion. I walked through the map to the left and entered the portal that would lead me to the final map I had to go through to get to Perion.

The screen remained black an unusual amount of time longer than the previous map took to load. Before anything, the music started playing out of nowhere. "Problem fixed without having to clean!" I had thought. I was at the point to clean my room up a little so that my dad could fix up the audio. Slowly I started realizing that it was odd that the music was playing without a problem, while the screen was still black. Sure, it's not unusual that the music plays when transferring through maps, but the fact that the music was 'broken' before made it feel a tad odd.

I pressed the all too well known key combination, control, alt and delete. Instead of returning to my desktop and being shown the Windows XP task manager, the game suddenly worked again. "Oh well, fine by me." was all that went through my mind as I walked to the left. I wasn't paying attention much and saw a white blob in my screen. I had this weird tendency to look at the mini-map instead of the actual map when navigating through a map I'm not training it. I didn't see any red dots in my mini-map so I found it weird to see something white in the corner of my eyes.

I looked down.

I stared for a few moments and started blinking to check what I was seeing being really there. A pure white skinned character was standing in front of me. It looked like a regular Maplestory character, though it didn't show an IGN underneath the character. Even the non-playable characters showed at least a name under their image.

I decided to double click her. To my surprise a regular character window popped up. No name, no level and no job. It only showed her fame being, infinite. Something I deemed impossible before I saw this, was… this all. I looked back at the character. She wasn't there anymore. Drastically I looked around the screen, the character window had also closed.

I focused my eyes on the character behind me. Hair long and white like I had never seen before, skin pale as my actual person at that moment, a weapon of a warrior's and a weird overall I had never seen before. My head started to hurt and my throat was dry. I started coughing, no longer focusing on my screen. I looked at my hands, covered in blood as I removed them from my face. The pain in my head, it was so horrible. With a loud thud I dropped to the floor.

I could hear my dad running up the stairs. He had heard me falling, no doubt. The headache had disappeared and in the background I could hear the faint sound of the opening music of the game I had been playing for an hour or two before this. I looked up to the screen and saw the log in page with a blue message. I closed my eyes for a moment and let everything in. My dad picked me up from the floor. I looked at my hands, no blood. I shrugged and felt my throat being clear, even my head felt as if I just woke up from a great night rest.

I looked at my dad, his mustache covering his once broken nose and the scar on his lip. He looked angry because the room was a mess but still worried about me acting weird. "Do you think it's weird that your chair got caught on something? Look at this mess! Clean it up. NOW!" I didn't put up the usual struggle of words with my dad about wanting to do it later. I quietly cleaned up, which surprised him a little. He left the room after a minute of silence.

As he closed the door, I looked at the message on my screen. There was no text. I knew that the blue message would show that I was banned; I wasn't completely stupid even though I was 11. I closed the message and tried logging in again. Nothing happened except the empty blue message appearing.

Confused as I was, I sat down. I tried a few times more to get into my account, but without a result. I made a new account, feeling sad about my Priest being gone. I logged on to the new account and to my surprise all my characters appeared there. Astonished, I logged off again. I went downstairs and sat to watch TV with my dad, him not questioning what I did.

A few years ago, I heard that the story was about the White Lady of Perion. An NPC, which can disconnect you, ban your account and even give you a virus. The story tells that this NPC was created when an ex Nexon employee had died while monitoring the game.

The employee named Muriel, was fired for unknown reasons and was working her last day. To take revenge on the company that had fired her, she wanted to eternalize herself in the game by making her character an NPC. Something went wrong and she was found dead in front of her computer, without being logged off.

They say the White Lady is no longer in the game, as she was removed in the Big Bang patch. I can assure you however, that I'm still around.


End file.
